Max said:
I thought about his "lack of soul" in his playing coming from his training too. When I play trumpet, I don't try to be as soulful as possible. I play what's written, with whatever slight alterations are needed.
Yep, that's classical training for you. All the emotions are scripted on the sheet music, and if there's none there, you just play the note for it's value. I had similar training for the year I tried to learn clarinet. Which is a good thing for classical music as there's how many in the brass section? How many in woodwind and strings? Can you imagine the cacophany of noise and clashing views on music if it was as free form as rock?!
When I first started music, I got involved with classical music as a subject in High School. On one excursion, we went into the Conservatorium of Music in Sydney ands sat through a session with Don Burrows and George Golla, two jazz greats in Australia. They had a large group of kids playing classical music of varying competency and showed them how to NOT read the music but play it from the heart.
Some kids found it very hard to play any sort of melody line without a piece of sheet music in front of them.
Burrows plays flute, clarinet and various saxophones & really work the woodwind kids into a frenzy with squeals, held notes and quiet run downs etc. Quite against the grain of what the kids were learning at the time. Golla plays guitar but also worked with the keyboard kids too, again challenging them to step outside of their comfort zone of charts and sheet music and play from feel.
They worked to a jazz formula, which did allow maximum improvisation if you could grab a break and was good enough. Burrows threw to a break to quite a few woodwind players during some jams, and some cut it and some didn't. Ditto for Golla and his group.
That session really opened up everyone's eyes about the different ways to approach music & Burrows and Golla did it in such a way that no kid got upset by being put on the spot, they were real gentlemen about it. They also explained the way jazz worked and how they take a simple melody and abstract it out.
I wasn't proficient enough to play, but boy, I got the message loud and clear and it was pleasing to see some of my very snobby 7th year piano fellow students put on the spot and asked to do a solo, and find themselves stumbling along.
Then, of course, came the music of 70s prog rock, which was contemporary at the time. That involved a higher level of musical proficiency and also the genre of jazz/rock & fusion was hitting it's straps too, so as you see, there was a lot of album music being played that was trying to advocate a more formal approach to music than the rock'n'roll or jazz way of doing things.
It's no surprise that punk rock exploded a few years later......... the pendulum is always swinging.
